Special Collections rendering

The results of a summer-long renovation of Special Collections will be a boon for researchers from Vanderbilt and beyond. With more study space, a welcoming entrance and better light, exploring the university’s treasure trove of collections will be a vastly improved experience.

“As secondary material becomes available online, the libraries’ archival collections become increasingly important to scholars,” Dean of Libraries Connie Vinita Dowell said. “There is no substitute for holding a 15th century book of hours or a signed first edition of Ulysses in your hands to fully understand the author’s intention. We are thrilled to be able to share these rich sources of firsthand experience, the first draft of history, with the scholarly community in a renewed facility that protects and promotes them.”

Each year, Special Collections supplies primary resource material to a variety of local, national and international scholars. Vanderbilt’s collections contain strengths in journalism and news reporting, politics, literature, performing arts and Latin American collections.

“By drawing acclaimed scholars to Special Collections, we raise awareness of these vital resources and bring Vanderbilt further into the national discussion,” Dowell added.

The project, along the 21st Avenue side of the second floor, will enlarge the research space by relocating offices and repurposing existing square footage. Raised ceilings and pendant lighting will provide a more comfortable environment. Significant display areas for exhibits will be added, complementing the display spaces added during the 2010 renovation.

“Primary source materials—the unique and rare letters, photographs, prints and ephemera that Special Collections preserves and makes accessible—give students the means to develop critical thinking skills and create new scholarship,” said Bill Hook, library associate dean and one of the two project managers for the renovation. “The university understood this in 1941 when they called the original Special Collections ‘The Treasure Room.’”

Special Collections has a depth and richness that attracts scholars nationally and internationally but increasingly Vanderbilt’s faculty are featuring its materials in their classes. “Now these treasures—from Delbert Mann’s annotated script of the Oscar-winning film Marty to letters from Patsy Cline and a reporter’s notes from the Watergate hearings—will be housed in beautiful and usable spaces which will invite students to explore the magical stories of those who made history,” Dowell said. “Thanks to our library’s generous donors, our visitors will find welcoming spaces and along with that, inspiration.”

Vanderbilt University’s Central Library has been awarded a gold certification for its environmentally friendly 2010 renovation from the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System.

The recognition makes the Central Library the first Vanderbilt campus renovation to achieve this high honor. Vanderbilt University has a total of 12 LEED-certified buildings.

“We are thrilled that the renovation exceeded our initial sustainability goals and the recognition speaks to the dedication and commitment of the entire planning team,” said Connie Vinita Dowell, dean of libraries at Vanderbilt.

The library’s Green Team paired with its renovation partners to host a celebration in March. Participating groups included the Office of Sustainability and Environmental Management, Students Promoting Environmental Awareness and Responsibility (SPEAR), Vanderbilt Student Government and university architects.

“One of the most sustainable aspects of the renovation was the restoration of the building to its original grandeur while meeting the needs of today’s students,” said Keith Loiseau, university architect. More than 30,000 square feet were renovated on four floors of the 70-year-old library building. Goals included making the space more attractive and inviting to library users while addressing the needs of students in the 21st century. The improvements included bright and spacious study areas, refurbished grand reading rooms, new classrooms, a café, galleries with interactive exhibits and a large multipurpose space suited for community events. The $6 million renovation was designed by Nashville architects Gilbert McLaughlin Casella.

The LEED Green Building Rating System is the nationally recognized benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high-performance green buildings. LEED certification signifies that a building is environmentally responsible and a healthy place to live and work.

As part of its LEED-Gold certification, the renovation achieved credits for installation of an Encelium lighting system that is 30 percent more efficient; recycling of 75 to 80 percent of demolition waste; placement of recycling containers in 25 locations throughout the building; installation of dual-flush/low-flow toilets, low-flow faucet fixtures and a high-efficiency variable flow refrigerant HVAC mechanical system; and using recycled content in 10 percent of the new furniture and furnishings.

The campus celebrated the award on March 29 with tours of the building’s green enhancements and cake on the library lawn patio.

Bill Christie, the Frances Hampton Currey Professor of Finance and professor of law, donated printing plates from The Wall Street Journal’s Sept. 12, 2001, edition to Special Collections.

It is amazing that The Wall Street Journal was published the day after 9/11 at all. Its newsroom and corporate headquarters were directly across the street from the devastated World Trade Center, and the newspaper’s staff was evacuated after the first plane crashed into the north tower on Sept. 11, 2001. They were left to improvise reporting on one of this country’s most tragic moments.

Christie

The incredible efforts of those reporters and editors are now part of Vanderbilt Special Collections with William Christie’s donation of printing plates from the Sept. 12, 2001, edition. They were on display at the Central Library during the 10th anniversary of the tragedy.

“These remarkable printing plates give us a firsthand look at how the country came to grips with the terrible tragedy of 9/11. Their value for the library’s Special Collections is significant as historical icons and as records of the related story of news reporting that is a strength of the collections,” said Connie Vinita Dowell, dean of libraries.

A sales representative from The Wall Street Journal gave the plates to Christie, who at the time was dean of the Owen Graduate School of Management. Christie, now the Frances Hampton Currey Professor of Finance and professor of law, had remarked how impressed he was that the Journal’s staff was able to publish the Sept. 12 edition despite great challenges.

“I was thrilled and amazed to see the actual plates that were used to roll the paper off the press. It was phenomenal and I was incredibly honored to receive them,” he said. “As the anniversary of 9/11 approached, I thought they probably could have a much higher value than sitting in my office, so I gave them to Vanderbilt Special Collections.”

The tradition of collecting and storing written knowledge can be traced back more than 5,000 years, long before Aristotle taught the kings in Egypt how to arrange a library. From the Greek academy to the Age of Enlightenment, the academic library has served as the literal and academic center of the evolving modern university.

But the center is shifting. Libraries have had to change more in the last 20 years than they did in the 200 years prior. To include the expanding universe of digital resources while maintaining and updating physical resources, libraries must rethink how they will continue to be the heartbeat of modern universities.

Watkins

This challenge was the focus of a recent panel discussion for members of the Vanderbilt Board of Trust’s academic programs and student affairs committees. Board of Trust member Dr. Levi Watkins Jr., MD’70, opened the meeting, titled Research Libraries in the Age of Google. “Libraries today are an archive of academic richness, a center for research and a community hub for the university. Today’s libraries have to focus on not losing anything and acquiring a whole set of other things,” he said. “Vanderbilt’s libraries have done a good job adjusting to the electronic revolution, and the board is happy with the present and future of the library.”

Dean of Libraries Connie Vinita Dowell then began the discussion of where the library fits into the community in an age of rapidly increasing technology.

“Our collections—online, print and other formats—are still at the core of what we do,” she said. “Teaching our students the skills to be efficient and sophisticated information users in this complex research environment is key to their success at Vanderbilt and beyond. As librarians and scholars, we must be sure our students become intelligent information consumers.”

The panel consisted of Board of Trust member John R. Ingram, MBA’86; Associate Professor Vanessa B. Beasley, BA’88; Professor Marshall C. Eakin; and seniors Zye Hooks and Emily Cook.

Ingram

John R. Ingram:

chairman of Ingram Industries Inc. and Ingram Content Group, serving booksellers, librarians, educators and specialty retailers

“We have to determine what is the smartest way of using both old and new. We’re in a state of continuous transition, and I don’t expect that to stop anytime soon,” Ingram said. “Academic libraries will need to follow the business model of ‘failing quickly,’ … experimenting, fully expecting some of these experiments to fail. We have a forward-thinking dean, so we are building in the expectation of experimentation.

“To stay relevant, you have to anticipate needs before they emerge. In a university setting, it’s the same thing—meeting today’s needs while preparing for tomorrow’s.”

Beasley

Vanessa B. Beasley:

Associate Professor of Communication Studies, focusing on presidential rhetoric, U.S. political communication, and rhetorical criticism and theory

“There’s really only one place, one part of campus, whose only function is to facilitate discovery, and that is the library system. We can’t build new ways of thinking if we don’t understand the old ones,” she said.

“The library is a place and not a place at the same time—where students can go to search and talk to information experts, but also a system for bringing resources to them so they can make new discoveries on their own. The most important thing we can teach our students is the skill of discovering—the ability to know where to look for information and how to make consequential determinations to separate good information from less good information, and even the bad.”

Eakin

Marshall Eakin:

Professor of History, specializing in the history of Latin America and Brazil; faculty director, Ingram Scholarship Program

“As much as technology places the world at my fingertips, and those of my students, the key today is how to navigate this world, how to ask the right questions, to be efficient and effective in searching, to know where and how to look for information, in short—to learn how to learn.”

“I always depend on the incredible expertise of the librarians called subject specialists. They are the ones who have really had to retool, evolve and keep up with the astonishingly rapid technological transformations that have completely changed the nature of research libraries and their facilities. These subject specialist librarians at Vanderbilt have and will continue to guide us and teach us to teach our students how to do our research effectively and efficiently, with physical or digital resources.”

Zye Hooks:

senior in Latin American studies and history, speaker of Vanderbilt Student Government

“During the interview process for an internship at Google, I was asked to name the one accomplishment that I was the most proud of. That was easy—my term paper for history 200w. The topic? The reaction of the conservative Chilean press to the events of the 1968 Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia. Many library staff members came to my aid as I spent countless hours reviewing 30-year-old microfilm, perusing 19th century Portuguese travel logs, and reading works regarding Latin American-U.S. relations. My marathon research sessions led me to the paper that I had previously thought impossible, which earned me an A-plus and opened the door to my future—I have a job offer from Google.”

Film legend Fred Astaire is featured in this 1937 shot from “A Discussion in Percussion … on How to Beat the Band” photo series, part of the Francis Robinson Collection of Theatre, Music and Dance in Vanderbilt University’s Special Collections. Come see this and more when the exhibit “Stage and Screen: The Star Quality of Vanderbilt's Performing Arts Collections,” opens August 22 in the Central Library.

Instructional librarians Lee Ann Lannom (left) and Kitty Porter in the Central Library’s fourth-floor classroom.

Libraries are places of research and learning, but teaching is also a core function of a library. As information resources grow, the task of sifting through academic databases to find the best information becomes more difficult. Librarians throughout the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries specialize in research instruction—some even teach full courses—and the libraries now provide special classrooms geared toward teaching.

“I always see myself as a teacher,” says Lee Ann Lannom, librarian at Peabody Library. “Not always in a traditional sense, but always as a teacher.” By teaching a research session for a course, she helps students learn to master the library, familiarizing them with available databases, their specialties and how to search in them.

Lannom is well-suited to her role. “I love the hunt for information,” she says. “I like to look for that needle in a haystack.”

New teaching spaces in the Central Library—part of the recent $6 million renovation—offer librarians and professors the opportunity to meld the library into the classroom. Two dedicated classrooms were added during the renovation on the fourth and eighth floors, and a new conference room is prioritized for instructional use. About 70 sessions have already been held in the new classrooms.

“Classrooms were a key part of my goals with the renovation,” says Dean of Libraries Connie Vinita Dowell, “Teaching is one of the most important things we do.”

“We’ve had so much positive feedback on the new classrooms,” says Melinda Brown, instruction coordinator for the libraries. In the new fourth-floor space, desks are easily moved into clusters for group projects or set in traditional rows for lectures. Dual screens and a document camera make it easy to conduct critical examinations of rare source documents. Comfortable chairs, loaner laptops and wireless access allow students real-time opportunities to practice research methods using the library’s more than 300 electronic databases.

Library specialists also write Web-based library guides, or “Libguides,” that direct students to course- or topic-specific resources, services and more.

Kitty Porter has seen a lot of changes in her decades-long career as a librarian. “People didn’t used to do their own searches,” she recalls. “The librarians did the searches for them.” Today, she teaches a popular course for both undergraduate and graduate students focused on the nuances of searching the vast amount of chemical literature available through the Science and Engineering Library and how to best use it.

“It’s important to know where to look and how to look,” she says. “We can help with that.”

Nashville had baseball fever in June 2011 as the Vanderbilt Commodores made their first appearance at the College World Series, going all the way to the semifinals. Pictured here is an 1892 game with Vanderbilt facing Cumberland University in the first game played on what is now called Currey Field. That’s Kirkland Hall, still with its original two towers, in the background.

Of special note are the papers of pioneering film and TV director Delbert Mann, BA’41, and the papers of respected Afro-Hispanic author Manuel Zapata Olivella. These and other collections have an impact on teaching, learning and research every day at Vanderbilt.

The papers of Zapata Olivella, who has been called the 20th century’s most important Afro-Hispanic narrator, refocused the dissertation of graduate student John Maddox. “After we read Changó, El Gran Putas (Olivella’s masterwork), in William Luis’ Caribbean literature class, I discovered the library’s collection and designed much of my project around it,” he says. The Heard Library Society funded the acquisition of the papers.

Graduate student John Maddox displays a scrapbook from the Zapata Olivella collection.

Maddox’s dissertation is a literary analysis that examines how contemporary writers use historical fiction to revise written accounts of Africans’ roles in the history of the Americas. His work investigates how these writers used the lack of Latin American slave narratives to transform the ideas behind oral myths into new epics and national histories that reflect the politics of the ’60s and ’70s.

With his work, Maddox hopes to call more attention to Zapata Olivella and other important Latin American authors whom­ he feels deserve much more study from scholars of literature, culture and history. He believes the collection will become an unparalleled resource for researchers around the world.

“You can’t study contemporary Latin American literature, especially Afro-Hispanic literature, without reading Zapata Olivella, and you can’t understand Zapata Olivella’s complete oeuvre without this collection,” he says.

In Professor Richard Blackett’s history workshop, undergraduate students begin to understand primary source research with the opening project—a 25-page biography of a person they research through Special Collections.

“I insist that they use Special Collections to research a specific aspect of someone’s life,” says Blackett, the Andrew Jackson Professor of American History. “I want them to get their fingers soiled, to really feel the research. This is an opportunity to get really seasoned in what historians do. Primary source research like this is the foundation of everything we do in this business.”

His students have enjoyed using the Delbert Mann collection, which was a gift to Vanderbilt from Mann’s sons. “The collection is so expansive that students must carve out a specific idea to research,” he says. “Looking at his Oscar, or his years in the war—there are lots of World War II papers. Doing this helps students learn how to narrow a project so that it’s manageable.”

Blackett believes that the growing Special Collections is a jewel for students and research. “There are lots of little revelations in research; it’s the historian’s job to string the pieces together,” he says. “Special Collections is a wonderful resource, just full of uncovered treasures.”

That doesn’t surprise Carolyn Dever, dean of the College of Arts and Science. “Students benefit from their work in the library just as they do from work in any other laboratory on our campus: to lay their hands on materials, to explore and investigate, gives them a chance to advance their learning experientially,” she said.

Liz Norell says that researching the Alexander Papers was a perfect marriage of research, library skills and politics.

Liz Norell, who received a master’s in political science this year, helped identify items for exhibition from the pre-Senate papers recently donated to Vanderbilt’s Special Collections by U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander and his wife, Honey Alexander. (See story) Working with archivists to sort through the 660 cubic feet of materials has provided an entirely new dimension to Norell’s education.

“As a student of American politics, this has been amazing,” she said. “It’s an opportunity to learn about history that’s not been recorded yet.”

Working on the Alexander Papers has also allowed Norell, who also holds a master’s in library science, to see what it would be like to be an academic librarian. She describes her internship as a “perfect marriage” of research, library skills and politics.

“It’s been a terrific process of discovery about the (gubernatorial) campaign,” Norell said. “By reading through the documents, you can watch the campaign’s strategy develop and adapt.”

For Brad Cayer, who graduated in 2010 from the Owen Graduate School of Management, his role as a research assistant through Owen’s Walker Library opened up bigger doors for him—helping to research a book for then-Gov. Phil Bredesen.

Cayer was working as a research coach for undergraduate students in Owen’s summer Accelerator program while working toward his MBA in health care there. “I helped the students learn to find information quickly and effectively, and also learn to look at it with a critical eye,” he said.

His success as a research coach led to an opportunity to work as a researcher on Bredesen’s book about health care. Fresh Medicine: How to Fix Reform and Build a Sustainable Health Care System was released in the fall of 2010 as a response to the landmark health care bill that Congress passed earlier that year.

“This project took what I was learning in my MBA program and combined it with research at a very high level,” Cayer said. “The team would meet weekly to go over everyone’s research, and then we’d go out and do more research. We were focusing on the implications of the new health care policy.”

He credits his work as a research coach at Owen’s Walker Library for giving him the ability and opportunity to work on the Bredesen assignment. “Anything I know about research I know because of the folks at the Walker Library,” he says. “I was able to really focus on critical thinking—looking at sources, source bias, all those elements that give a source integrity. This project gave me real-world experience.”

No matter how you define community, the new community room in the Central Library fits the bill. Open since January, it has already hosted thousands of people for lectures, receptions and meetings.

Highlights from its first months include a speech by former U.S. Rep. Pat Schroeder and a panel discussion with three Vanderbilt alumni who have authored books focused on the civil rights movement. John Seigenthaler, founder of the First Amendment Center, chairman emeritus of The Tennessean and host of Nashville Public Television’s A Word on Words, moderated the panel.

Seigenthaler

“Traditionally, libraries have been magnets that draw people from all segments of the community for research and reading, of course, but for literary discourse and dialogue as well,” said Seigenthaler, who served in the early 1960s as an administrative assistant to then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and acted as the chief negotiator with the governor of Alabama. “I envision that the community room at the library will be that sort of magnet and will attract people from all over the Nashville area who will reflect the remarkable diversity of our region.”

A Board of Trust committee meeting met in the community room ­­this fall. Last spring, the boards of the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries and the Vanderbilt Alumni Association met in Vanderbilt’s libraries for the first time.

“What a great space,” said James Stofan, associate vice chancellor for alumni relations. “The acoustics of the community room are outstanding, the technology available is of the highest quality and the space itself allows for outside light. The ambience was perfect for our business meeting as well as for our reception at the end of the day.”

­“In the community that is Vanderbilt and Nashville, we need more places to come together to learn and exchange ideas,” said Dean of Libraries Connie Vinita Dowell. “I want our students to hear the voices of poets and authors in their libraries and for our staff to host the nation’s library leaders so we can become even better at what we do. We are so grateful to now be able to co-sponsor lectures and events with colleagues across campus.”

Recent gifts to the Vanderbilt University Special Collections include the papers of television broadcasting pioneer Tippy Stringer Huntley Conrad and Thomas Wolfe items from alumnus Dr. Frank C. Wilson, BA’50. (Left) Shows Tippy Huntley with husband Chet Huntley preparing for the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. (Right) Are two of the many items recently donated as part of the Wilson Thomas Wolfe Book Collection. A 1947 edition of Look Homeward, Angel and an April 1958 Theatre Arts Magazine are among the hundreds of Wolfe items that Wilson gave to the library in 2010. The collection contains first editions and ephemeral materials about Wolfe and Southern literature, adding to the sizeable holdings in Special Collections.

Recent gifts to the Vanderbilt University Special Collections include the papers of television broadcasting pioneer Tippy Stringer Huntley Conrad and Thomas Wolfe items from alumnus Dr. Frank C. Wilson, BA’50.

“Recognizing that every great university requires a great library, she quietly yet forcefully created support from friends, alumni and faculty,” said Ann Cook Calhoun, a former Friends president and also a professor of English, emerita. When Chancellor Heard received emeritus status, then-Chancellor Joe B. Wyatt and the Board of Trust in 1984 named the library system The Jean and Alexander Heard Library.

“It was most fitting that Jean Heard’s name was included in the renaming of the library in 1984, for that action reflected the creative and vital personality of the one who was the main impetus for the establishment of the Friends of the Library,” former University Librarian Frank Grisham said. “She envisioned this effort as not only an opportunity to raise crucial funds for collections development, but a chance to increase the visibility and stature of the library in its community.” In 1998 the Friends honored Jean Heard with an endowed library fund in her name.

Mrs. Heard was a native of Andalusia, Ala., and graduated from the University of Alabama and the Juilliard School of Music. She married Alexander Heard in 1949. She was an accomplished violinist, civic leader, and education and social welfare reformer whose achievements extended far beyond the realm of the library. But we remember her best for her ongoing support of the library. “Books were an important part of Jean Heard’s life,” noted longtime university administrator John Poindexter. “She saw them not as collectors’ items but as tools for learning—for understanding the world around us and the world within. The Heard Library system had no greater champion or more powerful voice.”

A memorial service was held on January 8 in Benton Chapel.

Three NASA veterans have included Vanderbilt in their resumes and in their legacy by donating their papers to Vanderbilt.

Physicist Rick Chappell worked at NASA for almost a quarter century, including time as a payload specialist, and later served as the chief scientist for the Marshall Space Center. Taylor Wang was the nation’s first Chinese-American astronaut and flew on Challenger’s first operational Spacelab mission. Astronomer Charles O’Dell was the project scientist for the Hubble, securing support and funding for the space-based telescope.

“Donations like these allow us to get an inside look into important developments in our history,” says Juanita Murray, director of Special Collections for the library. “You can use these papers to learn firsthand what one person’s experience was. These are invaluable for primary research.” The library is cataloging Chappell’s papers, which encompass his work at Marshall, including outreach for NASA and GLOBE, a Clinton-era initiative on environmental issues.

Wang fulfills childhood prophesy

Taylor Wang celebrates after his space shuttle mission.

When Taylor Wang was 3, he fell from a ship into China’s raging Jialing River. He grabbed onto a floating bamboo pole and by chance, a fisherman down river hauled him back to safety. There is an old Chinese saying if one survives such a disaster, good things will happen to him. And good things did happen­—he married the love of his life and he was chosen as the first ethnic Chinese to go into space.

As a scientist, Wang, now Centennial Professor, Emeritus, at Vanderbilt, designed innovative drop dynamics experiments in zero gravity. His work drew NASA’s attention and resulted in him being chosen as the nation’s first Chinese-American astronaut in 1985. He and another payload specialist were responsible for conducting 12 key scientific experiments aboard the Challenger STS-51-B space shuttle flight, the first operational Spacelab mission.

Wang’s personal experiment initially failed, and he pleaded with NASA administrators to give him extra time to fix it. When NASA refused, he said in total desperation, “If you guys don’t give me a chance to repair my instrument, I’m not coming back.” Supported by his fellow astronauts, Wang was eventually given extra time by Mission Control. Working around the clock, he repaired the equipment and the experiment was a success—it continues to contribute to his current research interests in fighting diabetes.

Wang became an American citizen after immigrating to the U.S. from China in the early 1960s and earned three degrees at UCLA. He was directing a lab at the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., when he was picked for the seventh Challenger space shuttle flight that lifted off in April 1985. Upon his return to Earth, Wang received many awards and recognitions, including the NASA Space Flight medal, and was recognized on Oct. 11, 1985, with “Taylor G. Wang Recognition Day” in Washington, D.C. He also addressed the United Nations General Assembly.

In 1988 Wang joined Vanderbilt as the Centennial Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and director of the Center for Microgravity Research and Applications. In 1992 and 1995, scientists aboard shuttle flights successfully carried out his experiments on compound drop dynamics in zero gravity and encapsulations for living cells, respectively.

Wang chose to donate his papers to Vanderbilt because of his dedication to students. “I demanded the best from my students, and they responded,” he said. “What better place to leave my lifelong work?”

Wang’s novel encapsulation system of living cells has practical applications in the fight against hormone-deficient diseases such as Type 1 diabetes, Parkinson’s disease and others. The encapsulated pancreatic islets can deliver insulin through nanopores without the need to use powerful immune-suppressing drugs. The treatment has proved successful in trials transplanting the cells into diabetic mice and dogs. Working with doctors and researchers at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Wang says current results with primates are equally promising, and he is hopeful that human trials will be allowed by the FDA within the next two years.

Wang hopes that researchers use his papers to help them follow their natural curiosity. “I changed my research many times,” he said. “If you follow your interest, not your training, you will have an exciting career.”

Fascination with the ‘what might be’ charted course for his career

Rick Chappell, research professor of physics and consultant for space science in Public Affairs, came to Vanderbilt’s campus as a freshman in 1961 determined to carve out a career in space exploration. After earning a bachelor’s degree in physics followed by a Ph.D. in space science at Rice University, he took a job in 1968 with Lockheed Missile and Space Co., studying the magnetic fields and plasma particles (electrified gases) found in space far beyond the Earth.

“Conventional wisdom said that these particles originate in the sun and are carried to Earth by the solar wind,” Chappell says. “Our satellite-based research has shown in contrast that most of the particles come from Earth’s upper atmosphere and flow out into Earth’s high-altitude magnetic field, called the magnetosphere. It’s important to understand the correct origin of these particles, which cause the aurora and which can disrupt radio communications and satellite operations.”

Rick Chappell (bottom center, holding on to floor) trained with fellow astronauts aboard the famous “Vomit Comet,” a parabola-flying aircraft which simulates the weightless environment of space. Many of the participants who fly on the aircraft develop motion sickness, leading to the airplane's nickname.

After six years with Lockheed, Chappell spent the next 24 years with NASA at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., where he eventually became the center’s chief scientist. During that time, he trained to be a payload specialist, a scientist/astronaut who conducts scientific experiments on the space shuttle. Because of the 1986 Challenger accident, Chappell’s shuttle training lasted seven years and he served in the payload operations center during the 1992 mission.

In 1996, at the request of then-Chancellor Joe B. Wyatt, Chappell returned to Vanderbilt as a Freedom Forum First Amendment Scholar. Chappell and Jim Hartz, former host of The Today Show, collaborated on a Freedom Forum study about communicating science through the media to the public. The resulting study, called “Worlds Apart,” led to the creation of an interdisciplinary major at Vanderbilt, called the Communication of Science and Technology. Graduates in this major have taken up careers in such fields as public health, science writing, pharmaceutical sales, law and medicine.

From 2002 to 2009 Chappell also served as executive director of Vanderbilt Dyer Observatory. During this time, he led Dyer’s renovation both inside and out and helped transform it into a community outreach facility with space camps for students and science programs for schoolteachers. Chappell helped create the popular Bluebird on the Mountain singer-songwriter series as well. Thanks to all of these initiatives, the number of annual visitors to Dyer increased from 500 to 11,000 during his tenure, and the observatory received government science outreach grants totaling more than $300,000.

Chappell has followed his personal goal of “living in the what might be” from his student days at Vanderbilt to his return to the campus 14 years ago. His donated papers follow that path, covering his Marshall Flight Center years, including space shuttle development, his NASA outreach work and later environmental projects. Chappell is also donating the papers of his father, longtime Huntingdon College history professor Gordon Chappell, who earned his master’s and doctoral degrees at Vanderbilt, which are mainly focused on Alabama and Tennessee history.

Grade-school assignment leads to future among the stars

Bob O’Dell, Distinguished Research Professor of Astrophysics, recalls a sixth-grade assignment to write an essay on what he hoped to be doing in 25 years. “I said I wanted to be an astronomer observing with a 200-inch telescope,” says O’Dell, who was already building his own small telescopes by the time he was in the eighth grade. “At the time the Palomar Mountain Observatory had the biggest telescope in the world. I’m sure I learned about it in My Weekly Reader.”

Little could he have imagined that he would one day be the chief scientist for a telescope located in outer space—the Hubble Space Telescope.

In 1971 NASA began studying the feasibility of the space-based telescope and asked O’Dell, then a full professor of astronomy at the University of Chicago, to join its advisory group of elite astronomers and engineers. The following year O’Dell left Chicago to become NASA’s chief scientist for the project. His first task was to persuade Congress to fund the telescope and major research institutions such as Harvard, Chicago and the California Institute of Technology to participate in the project rather than concentrating on ground-based telescopes. The funding process took six years.

Bob O’Dell with an image of the Orion Nebula.

“It was clear that Hubble was going to be the most powerful telescope of my generation, if not my lifetime, and that has proven to be the case,” O’Dell says. “That’s why I was willing to gamble on leaving Chicago to work for NASA.”

Construction on Hubble began in 1978 and was completed eight years later, but several delays, including the postponement of space shuttle flights after the 1986 Challenger explosion, prevented its launch until 1990. Once in orbit, Hubble transformed the way scientists look at the universe. The numerous discoveries made through its lens have resulted in almost a thousand new papers published each year using Hubble data.

O’Dell’s work on Hubble is the focus of his donated papers. “I expect that my papers will be of greatest interest to those interested in the enormous change in the practice of astronomy that began with the start of the ‘space age,’” he said. “This should be particularly true for those interested in the creation of the Hubble Space Telescope.”

After construction of the telescope neared completion in the early ’80s, O’Dell returned to academia at Rice University. In 2000 he came to Vanderbilt, where his focus has been studying the Orion Nebula and planetary nebulae via Hubble. The Orion Nebula is the closest center of massive star formation—a stellar nursery that reproduces the conditions in which our own sun formed some 4.5 billion years ago. O’Dell is the author of the 2003 book The Orion Nebula, Where Stars Are Born.

“I’ve been working on Orion for not quite half a century,” O’Dell says with a wry grin. “You’d think I’d have it figured out by now, wouldn’t you?”

Despite the difficult economic times in which the 1941 library was planned and built, the planners worked hard to make the building beautiful and functional. The exterior was built in a collegiate gothic style, but the real attention was focused on the interior with the goal of creating the perfect learning environment. Most of the reading rooms, including the James H. Kirkland Reference Room shown above, had woodwork fashioned

W­­­­­­­­­hen Vanderbilt’s Central Library opened in 1941, it was progressive in concept and design. The concept—bringing together the resources of Vanderbilt, George Peabody College for Teachers and Scarritt College to create a facility for all three institutions—created a library far better than each could do alone. The design was the model of modernity, with air conditioning, just-introduced fluorescent lighting and the latest in automation—vacuum tubes and a book conveyor system.

The student body was as proud of the new library as was the rest of the university community.

“The library was a very important part of my experience at Vanderbilt,” said Dr. Robert H. Moore, BA’47, MD’51. “I was a member of the Writers Group as an undergraduate and we met in the library. When I was in medical school, we didn’t have the Internet, of course, and we would go over to the library to look up items in the Index Medicus (a comprehensive index of medical scientific journal articles) and then we would look up the appropriate journal so we could read the article.”

Joe “Tiger Joe” Thompson, BA’41, ignored the hot July and August weather that year and volunteered with other classmates to tote books from the old library in Kirkland Hall to the new facility.

Frederick Kuhlman, Vanderbilt director of libraries for 24 years, was the facility’s primary designer. He visited more than 20 university libraries to gather ideas. The library building that Kuhlman envisioned has changed little since its opening nearly 70 years ago, while the information world has evolved beyond what he could then comprehend. The ongoing renovations will take the library into the next generation.

The circulation desk, above, was the main feature of the library lobby and also home to the hundreds of card catalog drawers lining the walls.

In the Graduate Reading Room located in the stacks on the third floor of the library, grad students, many of them in the military, were each assigned a numbered desk for the academic year. The desks were designed with slanted tops and special materials to facilitate studying.

The Central Library in 1941 featured all the newest offerings—fluorescent lights, air conditioning, vacuum tubes and book conveyor belts.

Eugène Atget. The wine seller 15 Rue Boyer, 1910-1911. Gelatin silver print.

W.T. Bandy Center for Baudelaire and Modern French Studies. The most notable loan is Pia’s copy of Nadja by Andre Breton, signed by the author, widely considered as the most important novel of the Surrealism movement.

Eugène Atget. Rue du Figuier, 1924. Albumen print, 9 in. x 7 in.

The New York curator of the exhibition, art historian Therese Lichtenstein, included the Pia collection works among items from important private and museum collections. The exhibition was at the International Center of Photography in New York City through May and then traveled to the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Ga., from June through September.

More than 120 photographs by the artists Man Ray, Eugène Atget, Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí and Brassaï and others make up the exhibition’s featured works, supported by select films, books, journals and period ephemera by Surrealist photographers, filmmakers and writers during the 1920s and 1930s.

Pascal Pia was a literary critic, poet, and editor who occupied a prominent place in 20th century French literary and intellectual circles. His collection of more than 20,000 volumes was acquired by Vanderbilt in 1981 and includes many historically significant writings about Surrealism.

Longtime NBC President and Chairman of the Board Julian Goodman, whose accomplished news career includes the Huntley/Brinkley years and the Nixon/Kennedy debates and beyond, has deposited his papers in the Vanderbilt Libraries Special Collections.

“The addition of Julian Goodman’s papers affirms Vanderbilt’s standing as an international resource for American news and the American view of history,” said Dean of Libraries Connie Vinita Dowell. The Goodman papers are one of the anchors of our growing holdings of news leaders and political figures who shaped the news and lived at the center of so many important events of our time. Goodman’s archives are especially significant for us because their papers relate to and support the content of the Vanderbilt Television News Archives. All together, these print and media collections are a mark of distinction for Vanderbilt University.”

Goodman, now 88, sees the media world as a different planet today—an unending news cycle, hundreds of cable networks, outspoken commentators, millions of websites. But he is philosophical about the technological revolution of better communication, faster reporting and fierce competition.

“There are more opportunities to be inaccurate now,” he says. “But there are plenty of people to correct you. Your competition will correct you.”

Goodman’s papers reflect the business of broadcasting from 1945, when he started as a news writer, through his 1979 retirement at the helm of the network. The content of the collection
will support and inform how scholars understand the NBC news broadcasts of the early years of the Television News Archive, particularly the period from 1968 to 1974. John Seigenthaler (founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt, former editor, publisher and chairman of The Tennessean, and founding editorial director of USA Today), agrees that Goodman’s collection will complement the focus of the archives.

“For more than three decades, Julian Goodman’s work and leadership at NBC were a vital force in shaping, enlivening and enhancing the culture of our nation’s communications media,” Seigenthaler said. “The gift of his papers to Vanderbilt is an archival treasure. The documents will enrich the work of researchers seeking to understand the unique impact television had on our society, our government and our politics in the second half of the 20th century. Constitutional scholars will find Julian’s courageous stand for rights of free expression of particular interest.  The papers provide yet another dimension to the magnetic appeal of the TV News Archives created by Vanderbilt more than 40 years ago.”

Goodman, a native of Glasgow, Ky., became NBC’s youngest president at 44. He was chief of network news during its heyday, nurturing the talent of star newscaster David Brinkley and overseeing one of the great anchor teams in TV history, Brinkley and Chet Huntley. He pioneered the TV newsmagazine format (ahead of 60 Minutes) with the award-winning David Brinkley’s Journal in the early 1960s.
During the 1960 national election campaign, Goodman produced the second broadcast of “The Great Debates” between presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon and later earned a spot on then-President Nixon’s infamous enemies list.

The nearly four decades of Julian Goodman’s NBC career, from 1945 to 1979, reads like a course in modern American history.

Honors have been heaped upon Goodman during his long career. In 1974 he was honored with a George Foster Peabody Award for his “outstanding work in the area of First Amendment rights and privileges for broadcasting.” In 1976 he received broadcasting’s most prestigious honor, the National Association of Broadcaster’s Distinguished Service Award, for his work as a “broadcast journalist, program innovator and industry leader.” He has also been honored in the academic world, winning the Distinguished Alumni Award from the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and the Outstanding Alumnus of Kentucky award from the Kentucky Advocates for Higher Education.

Brinkley summed up the career of his close friend and longtime boss on the national news upon the occasion of Goodman’s retirement in 1979.

“Julian Goodman came to work at NBC in 1945 as a news writer, back in the days of steam radio (“steam radio” was a term coined in the U.K. in the early 1950s to describe radio as old-fashioned in comparison to television) when the news was read by announcers,” Brinkley said. “Well, from there he rose to president and board chairman of NBC and to becoming one of the most admired and respected people in broadcasting. Along the way, he, as much as anyone, helped to make NBC News and all television news, a useful and reliable service to the public.”

Goodman and his wife, Betty, live in Jupiter, Fla.

The Vanderbilt Board of Trust approved the $6 million renovation of the library, which is designed to increase the libraries’ support of the university’s educational mission while creating a warmer, more inviting facility for students, faculty, and the community.

“With these changes, our libraries will make additional intellectual contributions to our campus,” Dean of Libraries Connie Vinita Dowell said. “First and foremost, we will offer additional and more attractive study spaces. The environment will be enhanced with extensive exhibits—both electronic and those featuring our extensive collections of rare books and archives. There will also be more artwork.

“And, beginning next spring, the libraries will be able to host readings and lectures in a room large enough to open them to the community,” Dowell continued “I look forward to gatherings here that connect scholars of all ages from across our campus and beyond.”

Vanderbilt Student Government President Wyatt Smith and Vice President Lori Murphy present Dean of Libraries Connie V. Dowell with a proclamation earlier this year.

Over the past year, Dowell sought extensive input from faculty, students and staff regarding the campus libraries through dozens of focus groups, presentations and meetings along with more than 2,200 responses to a campus libraries survey.

Student leaders who have seen the plans are excited about the changes. “Dean Dowell brings exciting leadership and a strong vision for transforming our library into a more accommodating, interesting and supportive facility,” said Wyatt Smith, 2009-10 president of the Student Government Association. “I think the students will embrace the opportunity to study and to congregate in a facility that has so many accommodations that are a step beyond anything we’ve seen in the past.”

Jonathan Wellons, 2009-10 president of the Graduate Student Council, echoes Smith. “Dean Dowell came to one of our meetings and gave a very detailed presentation, and she had the blueprints posted for us to see,” he said. “The ideas that we heard—the increased public space, the new and more comfortable furniture, improved lighting, the spaces that can be configured for a variety of presentations—are all things students need.”
Vanderbilt Student Government recognized Dowell and the library staff in February with a resolution praising their efforts in planning the renovation and their commitment to “creating a flagship library of the highest quality and excellence for the university.”

“Vanderbilt’s exceptional students have high expectations of their libraries,” Dowell said. “They are a joy to work with, and I want them to know that their libraries have a commitment to help them succeed in every way we can.”

The project will expand the library’s exposure to the community, increase the opportunities for students to discover information from primary sources, and begin to create the “destination library” described by Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos in 2008.

The campus department of Facilities and Environmental Affairs is working with Orion Construction and Gilbert McLaughlin Casella Architects on the project. In all, almost 19,000 square feet will be renovated.

“It’s very inspiring from a facilities’ perspective to try to get the 3-D aspects in alignment with the vision being painted by our innovative new dean and her team,” said Judson Newbern, deputy vice chancellor for facilities and environmental affairs. “It is very motivational to all of us to set the stage, both on the interior and exterior, to re-energize that wonderful location.”

Construction began in February on the eighth floor Flowers Wing, formerly home to 75,000 books and walls lined with vintage study carrels. The renovated eighth floor will provide 2,300 square feet of new open space for student study, with comfortable furniture and natural light from the windows. It will also have a large group study room and a conference room. Librarians who often consult with students and faculty will have offices on the floor.

Work will then move to the second and fourth floors. The main entrance from 21st Avenue will be enhanced, with new concrete stairs and wheelchair access ramps. A 1,240-square-foot gallery will be created by enclosing the breezeway between the Divinity Library and the Flowers Wing. After the renovation, library users will be able to see from the Divinity Library through Special Collections to 21st Avenue.

The main campus entrance and lobby on the fourth floor will be transformed into a sunlit, spacious welcoming area. A consolidated service desk will be easier for patrons to use. One computer alcove will become a browsing area with cozy furniture; the other will be a sizeable display and exhibit space. Computer work stations will be moved to reduce sunlight glare.

Renovations to the main reference room will add a library instruction area and a spacious reading and study space to the existing reference space. The final renovation phase will change a staff workroom into a multipurpose community room and study space, complete with an indoor café and open-air patio with umbrellas, tables and chairs.

The project is scheduled to be finished in December 2010.

Paula Covington reaches out to the statue of William Herbert, the third Earl of Pembroke and a major benefactor of the Bodleian Library. A Latin inscription with the statue (not shown) reads, “Academicians at Oxford! Thomas Bodley (the library’s key benefactor who also gave it his name) has built this library for you and the Republic of the Learned. May the gift turn out well.”

When the Oxford rail station loudspeaker boomed out “Mind the gap, please,” I knew I was really back in England. The heads of two groups of Oxford’s University Libraries had invited me for a consultancy for the Bodleian and other libraries that make up the university’s library system. My project was to help review their Hispanic collections and the steps they might take to better serve their readers.

Over the summer, I met with more than 40 faculty, staff and students while working primarily in the Taylor Institution, the Latin American Centre and the Social Sciences libraries. Key Latin American and Iberian academics shared their research needs, particularly in the areas of the social sciences and humanities. I reviewed the libraries’ recent collections, their approval plans for Latin American, Iberian and Caribbean countries, and their journals and electronic resources. They also asked me to prepare an extensive set of recommendations to share with the new subject specialists they expect to appoint.

It was not always hardship duty. Most academics wanted to meet at their college over lunch, which often meant a dining room with silver napkin rings and a high table, or even a private oak-paneled dining room.

The experience has left me with many fond memories, from tea in the garden of a knight and his lady, to a garden party at the famous Encaenia ceremony, where hundreds of academics arrayed like peacocks paraded in their colorful academic robes, to biking daily to work where I found welcoming colleagues specializing in Italian, Middle Eastern Studies, or Frisian linguistics! Although I’m back at Vanderbilt, I will miss being part of that other world.

Chancellor Alexander Heard is surrounded by books in this photograph taken at his Vanderbilt office.

When Chancellor Emeritus Alexander Heard passed away in July at age 92, the library lost one of its foremost friends.

The Jean and Alexander Heard Library, which bears both his name and that of his wife, benefited immensely during his tenure as chancellor through his fundraising and leadership efforts.

Jean Heard pitched in by founding the Friends of the Library fundraising organization and serving as its first president, often hosting board meetings in her home. The highest library donation level is aptly titled the Heard Library Society. The Heards were the focus of a large exhibit in Special Collections in the fall of 2009.

Heard retired in June 1982, and the decision to name the library in honor of the chancellor emeritus and his wife came about a year later.

“Jean and I are deeply grateful for the university’s generous and wholly unexpected action in naming the library,” he said at the time. “Every part of Vanderbilt is important, but we feel especially honored that a part of it that serves all the university faculty and students should bear our names.”

Heard, an adviser to three U.S. presidents, served as Vanderbilt’s fifth chancellor. He guided the university through the stormy period of the 1960s and 1970s without the unrest and violence that afflicted many college campuses.

“Alex Heard used to say that the library really is the heart of the university, and I believe that,” Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos said in 2008. “For Vanderbilt, with its strong tradition of discovery and research and its aspirations to continue to be a leader, it is essential that our library continue to be world-class.”

Vanderbilt Chancellor Alexander Heard, an adviser to three U.S. presidents, presents a report to President John F. Kennedy.

Frank Grisham served as the director of what was then called the Joint University Libraries and worked with Heard for 17 years. He said it was a rewarding experience.

“He was a modest and extremely intelligent man,” Grisham recalls. “Chancellor Heard knew the value of a library as a learning center—that’s the way he promoted it. The library was key to him. He was always an ardent and forceful supporter of the library.”

A student group of seven campus leaders that Heard admiringly named “The Wild Bunch” chose to honor the chancellor and his wife by creating an endowment in 1997 to purchase books for the Jean and Alexander Heard Library. Phil Walker, BA’77, was a member of the group and he elegantly summed up the chancellor’s powerful legacy.

“Chancellor Heard embodied everything for which Vanderbilt stands: Strength, courage, charm, civility, respect for all others regardless of their opinions, being the best, and an undying commitment to the freedom of ideas and discussion,” Walker said. “In many ways, Vanderbilt and Chancellor Heard became one. His spirit will live on each and every time a student or alum says to himself, ‘I am who I am because of Vanderbilt.’ In reality, all of us are who we are because of who Chancellor Heard was, and what that has let Vanderbilt become for each of us.”

The woman pictured on this postcard, mailed in November 1907, holds a Vanderbilt pennant. A Vanderbilt football cheer is printed along the bottom.

Editor’s note: Pictured here and on the cover are just a few of Ridley Wills II’s collection of about 26,000 Tennessee postcards.

Wills recently donated his collection of Vanderbilt and Peabody postcards, including those featured here, to the library.

He also used many postcards from his extensive collection in his book Touring Tennessee: A Postcard Panorama, 1898–1955. The Wills family has supported the Vanderbilt library for three generations.

The old gym still stands proudly on the Vanderbilt campus.

Furman Hall, home to the Chemistry Library in 1907 after the 1905 College Hall (now Kirkland) fire destroyed most of the library, also included classrooms and faculty offices—much as it does today.

During a 1907 visit to Peabody, President Teddy Roosevelt (standing in the automobile) is surrounded by students, supporters and the general public.

The statue of Vanderbilt founder Cornelius Vanderbilt looms with the Kirkland Hall tower in the background.

A close-up look at the Social Religious Building at Peabody (now known as the Wyatt Center).

Barry Moser’s woodcut of Mark Twain

Vanderbilt’s libraries are part of a citywide, months-long artistic exploration of the lively, provoking and distinctly American writer Mark Twain.

The “Twain & Twang” celebration kicked off downtown in the fall and continues through June.

A baker’s dozen of Nashville institutions joined together to focus on the works of Mark Twain in a variety of ways, crossing all artistic lines and attracting all ages. At Vanderbilt, the Twain celebration will be marked with the “Mark Twain: An American Enigma” exhibit of the library’s Marc H. Hollender Mark Twain Collection.

“It’s exciting to be a part of this citywide event,” Dean of Libraries Connie Vinita Dowell said. “Vanderbilt is a key part of the Nashville community, and I’m delighted to be celebrating Mark Twain and sharing such an amazing collection.”

Partnering with Vanderbilt in the Twain & Twang celebration are Cheekwood Botanical Garden, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Metro Parks, Nashville Children’s Theatre, Nashville Public Library, NPT, Metro Parks, People’s Branch Theatre, Tennessee Repertory Theatre, TPAC and YMCA artEMBRACE.

The Twain exhibit in Special Collections will run from January 31 through June 30. “We are fortunate to have such a strong collection in Twain materials—both first editions and original materials,” Dowell said. “The signature image of the exhibit is Barry Moser’s portrait of Twain. This image comes from one of our newest collections with permission from the acclaimed Tennessee-born artist. We are looking forward to sharing this exhibit with Nashville and beyond.”

After the Nashville show, the exhibit will move to San Diego State University for a 19-week run from August through December. Before joining Vanderbilt in 2008, Dowell was the head of that university’s libraries. She led the charge to partner with the California university to develop the Twain exhibit that will feature holdings from both Vanderbilt and San Diego State.

Vanderbilt’s Mark Twain collection will be on display during Twain & Twang. It was donated by the late Dr. Marc H. Hollender, a longtime Twain aficionado who traced his love of the author to reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a boy.

Hollender’s gift to the library contains about 350 items. It includes first editions of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. Hollender, a former chairman of the Medical Center’s Department of Psychiatry, once said that his profession had nothing to do with his avocation. “I want to enjoy Mark Twain, not analyze him,” he said.

Ten first-year students in the “Stealing in Music City” seminar were challenged to reinvent the music industry by creating a fair model of music distribution that discouraged music piracy. The solutions were different but shared common threads.

Freshmen (from left) Victoria Catanese, Allie Semler and Maria Crist present their solutions to the music piracy problem while instructors Holling Smith-Borne and Sara Manus evaluate the presentation.

Country Music Hall of Fame member Jim Foglesong commended the students for their interest. “I highly applaud these efforts to educate our students about the legal and illegal aspects of downloading music without paying for it,” he says. “For the most part, they have no idea that this practice is actually stealing, not only from the artist, the songwriter and the record company, but it also has a devastating ripple effect on the many thousands of people who make their livings in the music business.”

In fact, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry’s 2009 report on digital music says that despite initiatives by the music industry, 95 percent of music downloads continue to be illegal.

Seminar draws on Music City expertise

Holling Smith-Borne, director of the Anne Potter Wilson Music Library, and Sara Manus, its education and outreach librarian, taught the class. In their efforts to educate the students on copyright and intellectual property law, the instructors drew from the wealth of expertise available just blocks away on Nashville’s famed Music Row. Panel experts included Tim DuBois, currently a management professor at Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management and formerly senior partner at Universal South and president of Arista Records/Nashville; Randall Foster, licensing and business development manager at Naxos of America Inc.; and John Allen, vice president of Bug Music.

“We are very thankful we live in Music City,” Smith-Borne said. “This course would not be able to be taught in this manner if we did not live here.”

The government needs to be more involved

The student groups agreed that the government needs to regulate the usage of digital rights management (DRM), currently used by companies like Sony, Apple and Microsoft.

“Fewer DRM rules make purchasing (versus pirating) music much more appealing,” student Leslie Miller said.

Other suggestions for more government involvement included:
• Running a neutral, nonprofit peer-to-peer network.
• Holding peer-to-peer network owners responsible for registering and policing users.
• Overseeing mandatory copyright education at the elementary and middle school level.

“Every one of the groups acknowledged the fact that government was going to have to play some kind of role (in fighting piracy),” Dubois said. “For me, a jaded old person, it was refreshing to see college freshmen having faith that government could do something like this and be a help in it. I think it’s reflective of an attitude that I sense in a lot of young people.”

Develop subscription-based peer networks

The students agreed that peer-to-peer networks such as LimeWire, BitTorrent and Gnutella are extremely popular. Rather than fighting the networks, groups like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and record labels should join with them and offer subscription services at reasonable rates for consumers.

“Instead of looking for a solution, the RIAA has attacked consumers,” student Brian Wilke noted. “Not much progress has been made.”

Education crucial to stopping music piracy

The groups agreed that education was key to ending the music piracy problem. “It’s amazing to me how many students don’t understand the legalities of sharing intellectual property and copyrighted material,” Manus said.

“But none of the students have had an education in copyright law. They listen to their peers about what they can and cannot do.”

“I thought the students did a good job of coming up with some ideas for fighting piracy—some of which I had heard before but some of which were pretty original,” Dubois said.

Women’s basketball star Christina Wirth had a standout senior season, captaining the team for the second year as it won the SEC Tournament championship. She has been named SEC Scholar-Athlete of the Year, Most Valuable Player in the SEC Tournament, first team All-SEC forward and third team Academic All-American.

Which books matter most in your life? That’s the question we asked Vanderbilt Provost Richard McCarty and Vanderbilt women’s basketball star Christina Wirth. Both are avid readers. Even in the era of iPods, blogs, podcasts and satellite radio, a book you can hold in your hand still has the power to influence lives. Yes, books still matter.

Star senior forward Christina Wirth is, of course, accustomed to her teammates passing around the basketball with purpose and passion as they pursue glory for the Vanderbilt women’s basketball team.

Off court, they occasionally pass around other priceless cargo—books—to share with each other. Three years ago, one ended up in Wirth’s hands that soon had a profound effect on her view of life.

Two other teammates had read the novel Redeeming Love when they sent it her way after her freshman year. The fictional work by Francine Rivers turned out to be a page-turner that dramatized religious truth like no novel Wirth had encountered before.

“You don’t hear of a story like Redeeming Love very often,” she says. “And the message is powerful: There’s nothing you can do to make God stop loving you. Half the team has read it by now.”

Redeeming Love retells a turbulent story of romance and faith based on the Book of Hosea in the Old Testament. Author Rivers takes the biblical story and shifts it to the rough-and-tumble pioneer days of mid-19th century America, with a Christian emphasis. Her novel depicts the difficult life of Angel, a girl sold into prostitution who struggles to cope with the terrible damage done to her life, including an embittered distrust of men, before she encounters (reluctantly at first) the healing, redeeming love of the upright, persistent Michael Hosea.

“The book starts off depressing—this girl can’t catch a break!” Wirth says. “But you keep going, and by page 100 you can’t put it down.”

Wirth, an Arizona native and Roman Catholic, found the story to embody theological truths about God’s unconditional love.

The novel’s original biblical roots led Wirth to pick up the Book of Hosea itself, written in the eighth century B.C. by one of the latter Hebrew prophets.

“In the Old Testament, the characters aren’t so developed as in a novel, but that’s what is interesting about it,” Wirth says. “It’s not a made-up story; it’s the word of God.”

Wirth, a senior in Peabody’s human and organizational development program, is an enthusiastic reader who was named SEC Scholar-Athlete of the Year in women’s basketball and also earned a spot on the ESPN The Magazine Academic All-American third team. She keeps stacks of books near at hand as an end-of-day break from studying—novels and biographies mostly.

“I have always loved reading, and that love for reading has continued to grow over time,” she says. “As a student, I read all kinds of books for academic purposes, but nothing beats opening up a good book during my free time and just getting lost in it. I am always amazed at how books have a way of speaking to me. Whether I am reading a book for the first time or re-reading a favorite book for the fifth time, I always come away with an insight that seems to open up my eyes to something I hadn’t noticed before.”

In the case of Redeeming Love , she can thank some Vanderbilt teamwork for scoring a memorable read.

Vanderbilt Provost Richard McCarty

Vanderbilt Provost Richard McCarty turns to fiction only rarely, usually as a relaxing mental escape. But he miscalculated when he picked up A Thousand Splendid Suns, a harrowing story of survival in modern Afghanistan, written by Afghan émigré Khaled Hosseini, who also wrote The Kite Runner.

The book was emotionally draining. It made him weep when he got to the last pages as he sat on a plane. But it was exhilarating, so much so that he had to read it again, savoring its power a while longer. The book’s emotional impact—its testimony to human tragedy and resilience—struck deep with this trained psychologist and scholar. He is still sorting out the experience.

“From Hosseini’s writing you get a sense of how devastating the wars and conflicts play out at the individual level,” he says. “Our view of Afghan history is from 30,000 feet, if not higher, and we don’t appreciate the culture that emerged there so many centuries ago—and how much of it has been lost or forgotten now. What we lose sight of in our discussions of Afghanistan is the impact of events on the lives of real women, men and children.”

The novel traces the destiny and friendship of two Afghan women who are married to the same difficult man in the years before Taliban rule. The book dramatizes the abuse the women face, their suffering in war, and how their family commitments survive. The story unfolds amid the nation’s fierce convulsions from the time of the Soviet aggression in the 1980s to Taliban domination and post-Taliban reconstruction after the U.S. invasion in 2001.

For McCarty, one powerful theme is the history of a proud, multi-ethnic culture and its ruin. To the world, the emblem of that dismantling of Afghan history came in March 2001, when the Taliban destroyed two towering Buddhist statues, artifacts nearly 2,000 years old.

“With so many Afghan refugees now, the question is, ‘How does a country bring back its most talented people and restore that culture?’ ” McCarty says.

He was forcefully gripped by the plight of the book’s two female characters, their hope of endurance despite staggering misfortune in a patriarchal society ripped apart by warlords and repression.

“Each makes a decision that puts her life in her control,” he says. “These women are not simply controlled by external forces. Neither allows herself to be a victim. It’s a tribute to the author that he could write about women in such a compelling way.”

McCarty, a Virginia native, was named Vanderbilt provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs in 2008. He joined Vanderbilt in 2001 as professor of psychology and dean of the College of Arts and Science. McCarty could cite other books that recently held his interest, including David McCullough’s John Adams, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Michel Carmona’s Haussmann: His Life and Times, and the Making of Modern Paris, and also a study entitled “The Governance of Teaching Hospitals.”

But he remains haunted by an Afghan tale of the fragility of culture, the courage of the human spirit, and the flesh-and-blood consequences of ideology and statecraft.

“All of us have lost something in the last 40 years because of the suffering and turmoil in that country,” McCarty says.